It is commonly assumed that the United States and Latin America, culturally so different, move artistically to very different rhythms. Also common is the assumption that, with rare exception, the literary figures on one side of the global North/South divide have had little interest in the work of their counterparts. With "Mutual Impressions", Ilan Stavans dispels these notions by showing how solid the bridges between writers and across borders have been, at least since the early days of this century, and how crucial they are likely to become as we enter the next millennium. Divided into symmetrical halves - South reading North and North reading South - the book presents essays by leading novelists, poets, and other writers that focus on the work of another literary figure from across the divide.
Borges, for example, finds in Hawthorne the perfect precursor to his own interest in allegories; Katherine Anne Porter examines Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi as a rascal whose picaresque views of life in "The Itching Parrot" served to launch the Latin American novel; Cortazar study of the plots and style of Poe shows an affinity that left an indelible mark on the Argentine's short fiction; Susan Sontag views Machado de Assis as the ultimate mirror, a proto-postmodernist. With other essays by Thomas Pynchon, William H. Gass, John Updike, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, John Barth, Robert Coover, Pedro Henriquez Urena, Grace Pale y, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Mark Strand, among others, "Mutual Impressions" offers a remarkable view of the connections that comprise a literary tradition of the Americas. It is a book that will surprise and enliven its readers as it informs and awakens in them a sense of wonder.
